Books by Christopher B Patterson
Westphalia Press, 2020
In a cruise ship stateroom, a soul awkens in the afterlife, still dressed in the Roman servant ga... more In a cruise ship stateroom, a soul awkens in the afterlife, still dressed in the Roman servant garbs of his previous life.
He can’t remember much, but a silent woman stands out in his memory: his first and only love.
Unable to cope with an eternity without her, he leaps from the ship and back into the depths of the life stream.
Five hundred years later, he awakens again in the same stateroom, alone and fueled with new memories of her.
In his past lives she was a male insurgent, an elderly wise woman, an unruly servant.
For a millennia the pair are tethered together, clashing in love and fear, betraying each other in times of war and famine.
Before memory drives him mad, he vows to rescue her from the stream — even if it takes a thousand lifetimes more.
New York University Press, 2020
Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics t... more Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play.
Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology.
Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or protest.
Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.
Westphalia Press, 2018
Exasperated by the small-minded tyranny of his hometown, Skyler Faralan travels to Southeast Asia... more Exasperated by the small-minded tyranny of his hometown, Skyler Faralan travels to Southeast Asia with $500 and a death wish. After months of wandering, he crosses paths with other dejected travelers: Sophea, a short-fused NGO worker; Arthur, a brazen expat abandoned by his wife and son; and Winston, a defiant intellectual exile. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one Asian city to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place.
“Guillermo tells the stories of American expatriates seeking to lose or remake themselves in the far-flung corners of Asia. His narrative voice—steady, visual, and evocative—is complemented by his keen ear for dialogue.” —Peter Bacho, author of Cebu and winner of the American Book Award
“Guillermo’s novel teaches the reader how to engage the world and reveals the very best about being a traveler rather than a tourist. We follow not only a vivid visual adventure across Asia, but also a linguistic journey into understanding new language and a definition of ‘we’ that is inclusive and empowering and revealing.” —Shawn Hsu Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees
Kawika Guillermo moves and writes throughout Asia and North America, usually embarking from his station in Hong Kong. This is his first novel.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Texts written by Southeast Asian migrants have often been read, taught, and studied under the lab... more Texts written by Southeast Asian migrants have often been read, taught, and studied under the label of multicultural literature. But what if the ideology of multiculturalism—with its emphasis on authenticity and identifiable cultural difference—is precisely what this literature resists?
Transitive Cultures offers a new perspective on transpacific Anglophone literature, revealing how these chameleonic writers enact a variety of hybrid, transnational identities and intimacies. Examining literature from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as from Southeast Asian migrants in Canada, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland, this book considers how these authors use English strategically, as a means for building interethnic alliances and critiquing ruling power structures in both Southeast Asia and North America. Uncovering a wealth of texts from queer migrants, those who resist ethnic stereotypes, and those who feel few ties to their ostensible homelands, Transitive Cultures challenges conventional expectations regarding diaspora and minority writers.
Papers by Christopher B Patterson
This dissertation treats novels by Anglophone Southeast Asians who see their ascribed multicultur... more This dissertation treats novels by Anglophone Southeast Asians who see their ascribed multicultural identities (Malaysian, Filipino or Asian American) as conflating notions of race, sexuality, nationality and labor. Southeast Asian Anglophone narratives allow us to trace contemporary global multiculturalism as a strategy of governance that emerged from three historical conditions: British colonial pluralism in Malaysia and Singapore, American colonization in the Philippines, and regimes of liberal tolerance in the United States. Whereas these histories are rendered invisible or incoherent by U.S. nationalist narratives and literary canons, Southeast Asian Anglophone texts expose them as legible counter-narratives. This dissertation is inspired by the Malaysian literary theorist Lloyd Fernando, who, in 1975, envisioned migrant cultures as "part of an unceasing process" that are "capable of continuing as if an infinite series" (14). I dub this unceasing process "transitive culture" and trace its appearance as a theme in Southeast Asian Anglophone literature that sees migrants as selfconsciously managing and reinterpreting multiculturalist identities. This dissertation builds on work by scholars such as E. San Juan, Jodi Melamed and Vijay Mishra who argue that the narrative of western multiculturalism often bolsters the U.S. as an exceptional power, giving legitimately to U.S. military and political interventions abroad. I engage with an overlooked archive of Anglophone writing to account for the multiple origins of multiculturalism that U.S. literature and discourses have helped obscure. While recent scholarship has used a framework of diaspora to disrupt nationalist formations, this has often marginalized the Anglophone cultures that imperial encounters have also helped produce. I adopt the label "Anglophone" to argue that texts from writers in Southeast Asia and in the diaspora allow us to see global multiculturalism as a governing strategy that conflates nation and ethnicity to mark national identities as befitting particular types of labor, and to cast "multicultural" nation-states like the U.S. as an exceptional force in global politics. By revealing the imperial strategies and historical emergence of global multiculturalism, Southeast Asian Anglophone texts disrupt the conflation of race, nation and ethnicity, and offer transition as a means of resisting rigid identity types. Dedication To my family Table of Contents Introduction: Multiculturalism on the Defense, on the Rise?……………………………………..1
Journal of Transnational American Studies
Critical Studies in Media Communication
This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of... more This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of racial management as an attempt to understand how game logics can express varying and often contentious ways of enacting “diversity.” It argues that games themselves can help answer one of the most persistent questions about games today: “how do we make games more diverse?” We proceed by defining the racial logics—the “diversity rules”— structuring the Mass Effect series (BioWare, 2007–), Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Larian Studios, 2017). These games respectively place the player in the role of multicultural manager, racial empath, and divine avatar. These games show us the many logics, strategies, and appropriations that can occur when diversity itself is treated not as a complex process toward building social justice, but as an obtainable asset, and as the sole win condition in making and selling a game. Attending to these racial logics can open paths to new disciplinary directions in game studies by pushing beyond established domestic boundaries, liberal multiculturalist definitions of diversity, and ultimately into revealing our regional attitudes and particular ways of defining and practicing “diversity.”
Concentric：Literary and Cultural Studies, Mar 1, 2016
information (11). Whereas autoethnographic literature has diversified the American experience, it... more information (11). Whereas autoethnographic literature has diversified the American experience, it has also reproduced notions of ethnic authenticity by representing racial persecution within a particular historical context (the past), thereby buttressing a post-racial ideology that can be used to see contemporary forms of affirmative action and multicultural inclusion as no longer relevant. In her book Represent and Destroy, Jodi Melamed argues that by presuming ethnic literary texts to be "authentic, intimate, and representative" (37), educational institutions have deployed such literatures as a cultural technology that inculcates young people to "appropriate sensibilities for a multiracial, multicultural professional-managerial class" (32). Canadian writer and scholar Larissa Lai expresses a similar critique when she writes that the Canadian publishing industry has a taste for texts that "speak of Canadian history, speak of histories rooted in past injustice, or else treat brutal histories of 'over there'" ("Corrupted" 53). By locating "oppression in history" or "over there," the post-racial state "both denies and reproduces it in the
Amerasia Journal, Sep 2, 2019
ABSTRACTCold War discourses reconceived of Chinese cultures as two Chinas, one of the People’s Re... more ABSTRACTCold War discourses reconceived of Chinese cultures as two Chinas, one of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the other of the “other China” (Taiwan), or “Greater China” (Hong Kong, S...
Writing in 1955, the historian D. G. E. Hall noted that the term “South East Asia” signified a di... more Writing in 1955, the historian D. G. E. Hall noted that the term “South East Asia” signified a disparate region of simultaneous “intermixture between the earlier inhabitants and later comers” coupled with the persistence and maintenance of local differences, resulting in “a chaos of races and languages” rather than a tableau of unified beliefs, languages, and customs (p. 5). Similar observations apply to the societies comprising South and East Asia. It might be argued that “Asia” in its heterogeneity of peoples, languages, religions, and local identities emerged as a tentative continental concept only in the early twentieth century, during the last stages of colonialism, even as approaching independence and post‐independence eras augured competition among multiple new nation‐states such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore. In that sense, Asia is thus not a clearly demarcated location but a contested idea that invokes multiple geographies and histories of conquest, struggle, and self‐determination. Postcolonial Anglophone Asian literature might be understood as the multifarious writing emerging from these tumultuous pasts and presents, and it may be impossible to formulate a set of unifying theories that can systematically analyze or comprehensively address such a wide range of Anglophone Asian texts, their diverse authorial and readership positions, and their commingled literary histories and canons. Yet we might diachronically trace several key geopolitical, historical, and intellectual developments that weave rather than fuse these diverse strands into discernible threads.
Verge: Studies in Global Asias
This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asi... more This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asian American studies, Asian studies, and critical game studies. We discuss how digital games as an "Asiatic" medium function socially, culturally, politically, and economically and how games speak to Asian/American experiences through forms of play. 1 The forum looks beyond representations of Asian Americans in games to ask how games themselves have become Asiatic products even when they contain no explicit racial representations, as they are manufactured and innovated in Asian contexts and are often concerned with, and played by, sizable Asian audiences. We also seek to push beyond critiques of games as frivolous cultural objects or as mindless militaristic purveyors of violence and rather ask how games and gaming cultures play with forms of race, gender, sexuality, and nation and offer alternative ways of thinking about "difference" more broadly. The following documents explore, from four different angles, how games have been framed as forms of "Digital Asia," as products of Asia and transpacific empire, and how games have permitted forms of solidarity and resistance for Asian/American communities. We ask, How does play function within virtual spaces conceived of as Asian or Asian inflected? How are familiar Orientalist tropes reframed in the particular language of gaming? How have Asian/Americans been shaped within gaming and developer communities? This enterprise took the form of a roundtable carried out virtually across four simultaneous Google documents over a series of a few months.
CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION, 2022
This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of... more This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of racial management as an attempt to understand how game logics can express varying and often contentious ways of enacting “diversity.” It argues that games themselves can help answer one of the most persistent questions about games today: “how do we make games more diverse?” We proceed by defining the racial logics—the “diversity rules”— structuring the Mass Effect series (BioWare, 2007–), Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Larian Studios, 2017). These games respectively place the player in the role of multicultural manager, racial empath, and divine avatar. These games show us the many logics, strategies, and appropriations that can occur when diversity itself is treated not as a complex process toward building social justice, but as an obtainable asset, and as the sole win condition in making and selling a game. Attending to these racial logics can open paths to new disciplinary directions in game studies by pushing beyond established domestic boundaries, liberal multiculturalist definitions of diversity, and ultimately into revealing our regional attitudes and particular ways of defining and practicing “diversity.”
The Journal of Asian American Studies, 2021
The academy has taught me to isolate the past into weapons of my own
making: archive, text, stori... more The academy has taught me to isolate the past into weapons of my own
making: archive, text, stories of my family’s migration from Ilocos Norte
to Hawai’i, their offspring’s fornications with Native, Japanese, Korean,
Cambodian, Black, and Haole people. But there are other pasts. The past of my white, southern grandfather who preached that divorce and homosexuality were tempestuous paths to hell. Sometimes, the past is not an archive; it’s the white uncle asking you at your own grandmother’s funeral how you learned to speak English.
We all have work to do. Wake work, as Christina Sharpe put it. The work of dwelling in the wake of racist oppression, “plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death.” I attempt a different type of death work. Ode work: the work of giving honor and respect in a way that also dismantles that honor. I do not know how to speak of the dead without honor; I cannot speak of my elders without respect, even as I seek to strip every piece of metal from their armor.
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2021
The extent to which the bakla and feminine Filipino gay is a colonial imagined stereotype remains... more The extent to which the bakla and feminine Filipino gay is a colonial imagined stereotype remains a contentious issue and has yet to resolve with academic consensus. Clearly, however, figures of feminine gays and baklas are rampant in Philippine cinema as well as in daily visual culture, and cannot be a mere American fetish. 49 This quote, and these thoughts on arrival, were brought to my attention during a reading by Madeleine Thien and Rawi Hage. 50 Joshua Guzmán writes that for Muñoz, brownness persists "in the here-and-now as the materiality of everyday life," while queer utopia is always on the horizon and not-yet here (60).
Amerasia, 2019
Cold War discourses reconceived of Chinese cultures as two Chinas, one
of the People’s Republic o... more Cold War discourses reconceived of Chinese cultures as two Chinas, one
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the other of the “other
China” (Taiwan), or “Greater China” (Hong Kong, Singapore). Today, this
discourse has extended to reimagine Chineseness as either “inorganic”
(signifying one-party rule and social engineering) or as “organic” (signifying colonial hybridity and laissez-faire capitalism). We explore three texts about Hong Kong—the film Chinese Box (1997) and the video
games Sleeping Dogs (2012) and Shenmue II (2001)—to ask how the
inorganic/organic binary reveals the desires for globality that construct
both Chinas as competing global entities.
Creative Writing Scholars on the Publishing Trade, 2021
This chapter explores theories of creativity as a mechanism of power, focusing on how defining ‘t... more This chapter explores theories of creativity as a mechanism of power, focusing on how defining ‘the creative’ in the literary industry has been foundational to projects of nationalism and capitalist dissemination during and after the Cold War. As Mark McGurl and Eric Bennett have argued, the MFA Writing Workshop as a media factory network has also operated as a form of unofficial propaganda for American empire, particularly during the Cold War, as well as a form of disciplinary control within academic institutions through its authoritative control over definitions of ‘creativity’ and ‘craft’. To understand these tensions within creative writing industries and their larger transnational impacts, this chapter traces debates of creativity through two discourses within the American academic institution, (1) the ‘programmatic’ forms of fiction writing manifest in the MFA Program, and (2) the ‘problematic’ inquiries of creative writing by authors in the critical humanities disciplines of critical race studies, queer theory, and ethnic studies. This chapter will also attend to the presumptions of creative writing through its formal techniques as a hybrid creative/critical essay. It begins and ends with reflections on the author’s experience as both a scholar of literature and a creative writer whose main audience comes from academic associations. The author re-purposes the title of his first novel, Stamped: An Anti-travel Novel, to insist that creative industries promote marginalized writers as ‘stamps’ that (1) authenticate the creative industry as liberal and multicultural; (2) flatten authors and their works; and (3) provide readers access across racial borders that seem natural, but have in fact been imposed by creative industries themselves.
Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2021
This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asi... more This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asian American studies, Asian studies, and critical game studies. We discuss how digital games as an "Asiatic" medium function socially, culturally, politically, and economically and how games speak to Asian/American experiences through forms of play. The forum looks beyond representations of Asian Americans in games to ask how games themselves have become Asiatic products even when they contain no explicit racial representations, as they are manufactured and innovated in Asian contexts and are often concerned with, and played by, sizable Asian audiences. We also seek to push beyond critiques of games as frivolous cultural objects or as mindless militaristic purveyors of violence and rather ask how games and gaming cultures play with forms of race, gender, sexuality, and nation and offer alternative ways of thinking about "difference" more broadly. The following documents explore, from four different angles, how games have been framed as forms of "Digital Asia," as products of Asia and transpacific empire, and how games have permitted forms of solidarity and resistance for Asian/American communities. We ask, How does play function within virtual spaces conceived of as Asian or Asian inflected? How are familiar Orientalist tropes reframed in the particular language of gaming? How have Asian/Americans been shaped within gaming and developer communities? This enterprise took the form of a roundtable carried out virtually across four simultaneous Google documents over a series of a few months.
The Subject (s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique, 2019
This chapter considers how the figure of the “matronly maid” lays bare the failure of human right... more This chapter considers how the figure of the “matronly maid” lays bare the failure of human rights to account for the exploitative use of migrants whose labor is predicated on the denial of basic rights (political and economic rights as well as social and sexual rights). As Leslie Bow wrote in 1999, Asian American cultural production has often placed Asia within a human rights framework that depicts Asian “homelands” as spaces characterized by totalitarian regimes, deploying “the rhetoric of human rights in order to critique methods of governmental repression” as well as violations “such as torture and detention without trial” (40). What has been omitted from this rhetoric are forms of neoliberal exploitation reserved for migrants who seemingly follow similar “self-making” trajectories that have characterized the Asian American model minority. The celebrated freedoms to travel overseas, to make money and to find opportunity, obscure the exploitative dimensions of overseas work that suffocate rather than bestow liberal freedoms.
To investigate the “matronly maid” figure, I examine its literary expressions in two short story collections, Kristiana Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise (2013), and Mia Alvar’s In the Country (2015). Both collections have crossed a barrier in the popularity of the migrant worker, as both were published by Random House subsidiaries, and both have won numerous awards and accolades. From each collection, I focus on one story that uses the first person plural “we” and third person plural “they” to re-situate migrants into mobile sisterhoods that offer a support structure while also reinforcing expectations of matronly behavior. In doing so, these stories show how the figure of the migrant domestic worker is produced through a human rights discourse that sees care work as a sign of neoliberal benevolence, where capitalist exploitation is reframed as charity, and the matronly affection of migrant maids is reinterpreted as heartfelt gratitude. Whereas scholars have rightfully pointed out that migrants from the Philippines and the Pacific Islands have “competitive advantages” of domestic work by knowing English, can we also see conservative and religious sexual norms as marking domestic workers with a competitive edge? How crucial is “matronlyness” for the ongoing supply of affective labor?
This paper explores how Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Changrae Lee’s novel On Suc... more This paper explores how Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Changrae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea (2014) use speculative tropes to unsettle the “post-racial” futures imagined through the tethering of neoliberalism and multiculturalism. By combining speculative elements with tropes of queer reproduction, both novelists forgo the racial identities that make individuals recognizable to neoliberal multiculturalism. Instead, these texts focus on how the bodies, talents, stories, and memories of racialized subjects become appropriated and reconstructed for the purpose of maintaining a multi-racial upper class. In this essay, we consider how these Asian diasporic speculative texts enact their critique of neoliberal multiculturalism and its instrumentalization of ethnic/diasporic memory through the deployment of speculative tropes of (queer) reproduction.
Uploads
Books by Christopher B Patterson
He can’t remember much, but a silent woman stands out in his memory: his first and only love.
Unable to cope with an eternity without her, he leaps from the ship and back into the depths of the life stream.
Five hundred years later, he awakens again in the same stateroom, alone and fueled with new memories of her.
In his past lives she was a male insurgent, an elderly wise woman, an unruly servant.
For a millennia the pair are tethered together, clashing in love and fear, betraying each other in times of war and famine.
Before memory drives him mad, he vows to rescue her from the stream — even if it takes a thousand lifetimes more.
Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology.
Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or protest.
Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.
“Guillermo tells the stories of American expatriates seeking to lose or remake themselves in the far-flung corners of Asia. His narrative voice—steady, visual, and evocative—is complemented by his keen ear for dialogue.” —Peter Bacho, author of Cebu and winner of the American Book Award
“Guillermo’s novel teaches the reader how to engage the world and reveals the very best about being a traveler rather than a tourist. We follow not only a vivid visual adventure across Asia, but also a linguistic journey into understanding new language and a definition of ‘we’ that is inclusive and empowering and revealing.” —Shawn Hsu Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees
Kawika Guillermo moves and writes throughout Asia and North America, usually embarking from his station in Hong Kong. This is his first novel.
Transitive Cultures offers a new perspective on transpacific Anglophone literature, revealing how these chameleonic writers enact a variety of hybrid, transnational identities and intimacies. Examining literature from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as from Southeast Asian migrants in Canada, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland, this book considers how these authors use English strategically, as a means for building interethnic alliances and critiquing ruling power structures in both Southeast Asia and North America. Uncovering a wealth of texts from queer migrants, those who resist ethnic stereotypes, and those who feel few ties to their ostensible homelands, Transitive Cultures challenges conventional expectations regarding diaspora and minority writers.
Papers by Christopher B Patterson
making: archive, text, stories of my family’s migration from Ilocos Norte
to Hawai’i, their offspring’s fornications with Native, Japanese, Korean,
Cambodian, Black, and Haole people. But there are other pasts. The past of my white, southern grandfather who preached that divorce and homosexuality were tempestuous paths to hell. Sometimes, the past is not an archive; it’s the white uncle asking you at your own grandmother’s funeral how you learned to speak English.
We all have work to do. Wake work, as Christina Sharpe put it. The work of dwelling in the wake of racist oppression, “plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death.” I attempt a different type of death work. Ode work: the work of giving honor and respect in a way that also dismantles that honor. I do not know how to speak of the dead without honor; I cannot speak of my elders without respect, even as I seek to strip every piece of metal from their armor.
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the other of the “other
China” (Taiwan), or “Greater China” (Hong Kong, Singapore). Today, this
discourse has extended to reimagine Chineseness as either “inorganic”
(signifying one-party rule and social engineering) or as “organic” (signifying colonial hybridity and laissez-faire capitalism). We explore three texts about Hong Kong—the film Chinese Box (1997) and the video
games Sleeping Dogs (2012) and Shenmue II (2001)—to ask how the
inorganic/organic binary reveals the desires for globality that construct
both Chinas as competing global entities.
To investigate the “matronly maid” figure, I examine its literary expressions in two short story collections, Kristiana Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise (2013), and Mia Alvar’s In the Country (2015). Both collections have crossed a barrier in the popularity of the migrant worker, as both were published by Random House subsidiaries, and both have won numerous awards and accolades. From each collection, I focus on one story that uses the first person plural “we” and third person plural “they” to re-situate migrants into mobile sisterhoods that offer a support structure while also reinforcing expectations of matronly behavior. In doing so, these stories show how the figure of the migrant domestic worker is produced through a human rights discourse that sees care work as a sign of neoliberal benevolence, where capitalist exploitation is reframed as charity, and the matronly affection of migrant maids is reinterpreted as heartfelt gratitude. Whereas scholars have rightfully pointed out that migrants from the Philippines and the Pacific Islands have “competitive advantages” of domestic work by knowing English, can we also see conservative and religious sexual norms as marking domestic workers with a competitive edge? How crucial is “matronlyness” for the ongoing supply of affective labor?
He can’t remember much, but a silent woman stands out in his memory: his first and only love.
Unable to cope with an eternity without her, he leaps from the ship and back into the depths of the life stream.
Five hundred years later, he awakens again in the same stateroom, alone and fueled with new memories of her.
In his past lives she was a male insurgent, an elderly wise woman, an unruly servant.
For a millennia the pair are tethered together, clashing in love and fear, betraying each other in times of war and famine.
Before memory drives him mad, he vows to rescue her from the stream — even if it takes a thousand lifetimes more.
Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology.
Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or protest.
Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.
“Guillermo tells the stories of American expatriates seeking to lose or remake themselves in the far-flung corners of Asia. His narrative voice—steady, visual, and evocative—is complemented by his keen ear for dialogue.” —Peter Bacho, author of Cebu and winner of the American Book Award
“Guillermo’s novel teaches the reader how to engage the world and reveals the very best about being a traveler rather than a tourist. We follow not only a vivid visual adventure across Asia, but also a linguistic journey into understanding new language and a definition of ‘we’ that is inclusive and empowering and revealing.” —Shawn Hsu Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees
Kawika Guillermo moves and writes throughout Asia and North America, usually embarking from his station in Hong Kong. This is his first novel.
Transitive Cultures offers a new perspective on transpacific Anglophone literature, revealing how these chameleonic writers enact a variety of hybrid, transnational identities and intimacies. Examining literature from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as from Southeast Asian migrants in Canada, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland, this book considers how these authors use English strategically, as a means for building interethnic alliances and critiquing ruling power structures in both Southeast Asia and North America. Uncovering a wealth of texts from queer migrants, those who resist ethnic stereotypes, and those who feel few ties to their ostensible homelands, Transitive Cultures challenges conventional expectations regarding diaspora and minority writers.
making: archive, text, stories of my family’s migration from Ilocos Norte
to Hawai’i, their offspring’s fornications with Native, Japanese, Korean,
Cambodian, Black, and Haole people. But there are other pasts. The past of my white, southern grandfather who preached that divorce and homosexuality were tempestuous paths to hell. Sometimes, the past is not an archive; it’s the white uncle asking you at your own grandmother’s funeral how you learned to speak English.
We all have work to do. Wake work, as Christina Sharpe put it. The work of dwelling in the wake of racist oppression, “plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death.” I attempt a different type of death work. Ode work: the work of giving honor and respect in a way that also dismantles that honor. I do not know how to speak of the dead without honor; I cannot speak of my elders without respect, even as I seek to strip every piece of metal from their armor.
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the other of the “other
China” (Taiwan), or “Greater China” (Hong Kong, Singapore). Today, this
discourse has extended to reimagine Chineseness as either “inorganic”
(signifying one-party rule and social engineering) or as “organic” (signifying colonial hybridity and laissez-faire capitalism). We explore three texts about Hong Kong—the film Chinese Box (1997) and the video
games Sleeping Dogs (2012) and Shenmue II (2001)—to ask how the
inorganic/organic binary reveals the desires for globality that construct
both Chinas as competing global entities.
To investigate the “matronly maid” figure, I examine its literary expressions in two short story collections, Kristiana Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise (2013), and Mia Alvar’s In the Country (2015). Both collections have crossed a barrier in the popularity of the migrant worker, as both were published by Random House subsidiaries, and both have won numerous awards and accolades. From each collection, I focus on one story that uses the first person plural “we” and third person plural “they” to re-situate migrants into mobile sisterhoods that offer a support structure while also reinforcing expectations of matronly behavior. In doing so, these stories show how the figure of the migrant domestic worker is produced through a human rights discourse that sees care work as a sign of neoliberal benevolence, where capitalist exploitation is reframed as charity, and the matronly affection of migrant maids is reinterpreted as heartfelt gratitude. Whereas scholars have rightfully pointed out that migrants from the Philippines and the Pacific Islands have “competitive advantages” of domestic work by knowing English, can we also see conservative and religious sexual norms as marking domestic workers with a competitive edge? How crucial is “matronlyness” for the ongoing supply of affective labor?
sore to move, he strained his arms into the elliptical’s handles, his eyes pinned to the fog that draped over Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. A pallid fog that did not really exist until art invented it.
that taxis in Shanghai were cheaper than bus rides back in Seattle.
Ingratitude investigates the figure of the daughter in Asian American literature, which has lately been dismissed as a figure that downplays political and historical conflict by fulfilling model minority achievement. Ninh responds to this view by seeing the immigrant family as a form of capitalist enterprise, and thus the Asian American daughter as a locus of conflicting power. Through literary analyses of texts by Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Evelyn Lau and others, Ninh explores the figure of the Asian American daughter as a debtor, whose obligation to the parents are always designated to fail, and whose rebellion comes in the form of sexual freedom and through the act of writing itself.
Interracial Encounters investigates the overlapping of African American and Asian American literature. By focusing on the diverse attitudes that blacks and Asian Americans had towards each other, Dr. Lee pushes against dominant conceptions of these groups as either totally cooperative or as totally antagonistic. Lee also explores how American nationalism was produced through this comparison, and shows how Afro-Asian representations allowed readers and writers to consider alliances outside of the American nation-state.
If there’s anything worse than an academic who writes fiction, it’s the fiction writer who explains their stories through academic language. For many artists, not talking about the work becomes a way to protect one’s commodity/brand, to appear authentic and mysterious, but also universal, above politics, concerned only with craft, as if led by an uncatchable muse only visible to the artist. They let their agents, dealers, managers, editors talk for them.
I hope to write academically about fiction and creatively about research. But mainly I want to be able to do creative work within the institution, which can be both a resource for creative and academic work, as well as an entity seeking to see the author as a source, as the OED defines it, “a place, person, or thing from which something comes or can be obtained.”
So, since writers are somewhat expected to own the language we use, allow me to take a swing and spend this blog post caught in the gravity of this term. Just what exactly is “anti-travel”? I have the sense that it has something to do with 1) traveling as a queer mixed-race person of color, 2) inheriting self-destructive tendencies that have, in the past, bordered on suicidal, and 3) a mission to decolonize the spaces, histories and my own self-perceptions in any way I can. I hope to spend time reflecting on each of these points.
A warning: I don’t want to give the impression that just because someone identifies as non-white or queer that they will inherently practice a sort of “anti-travel” wherever they go. Stamped is in a way about the tendency for anyone to parrot colonial attitudes when high on the travelesque trappings of whimsy and delight.
My mother’s answer threw me. I was already a man of many aliases, some invented as video game avatars, some as roleplaying personas, some as masks I wore while traveling around Asia, and some just as imaginary alternatives to get as far away from my given name as possible. But now I had this name, “Kawika,” my little secret.
Yang’s Hurt Me Plenty brings the act of negotiating consensual power play to life! (Screenshot by author)
Robert is also an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Game Center, and has an article in the new anthology, Queer Game Studies.
He’s been interviewed by mainstream journalists in The Guardian, Kotaku, Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I read these interviews, feeling that they spoke little to the radical feelings of Robert’s games: how playing them feels as liberating as finding “the right position.”
So as both a scholar and an artist myself, I asked Robert questions that straddled the line of the academic and the artistic, the blustering and the indecent, the genteel and the invasive. At the risk of embarrassing us both, I’ve reproduced our interview unedited (I’m not a real journalist, remember):
The bilingual context in Hong Kong is a marked departure from America, Canada, and the U.K., wherein only one language passes for creative merit, with others relegated to the realm of annoying babel. In many Southeast Asian countries, English represents a colonial tradition alongside native creative languages — Mandarin, Tagalog, Cantonese, Malay. It’s a context that’s known for producing “bilingual fun,” where Chinglish and Taglish re-invigorate the old kingdoms of proper English. Bilingualism is fun because we are expected to make mistakes, even to fail, which too can be an aesthetic — for what is more enjoyable than a book of failures?
But the street comes to an end at Cloud bar, a “unique culture, art and music venue,” according to the googlemaps reviews I looked up, which also recommend the “excellent homemade punch.”
We squeeze into the back row of a shark-fin shaped room, where Kosal Khiev, the renowned refugee spoken word artist, will perform. A refugee to America at one year old, tried as an adult at sixteen for attempted murder, imprisoned for fourteen years, and at thirty-two, named an “alien” and forcibly deported to Cambodia, Kosal’s very survival is stunning. That his heart still beats after so much pain, that his mind still functions after fourteen years in prison, that his head still holds high after eight months in solitary confinement. That he’s not only here, but that he exudes a force both calming and energetic, alluring yet visceral.
What I feel is not the urgency of reconciliation, but the paralyzing fear of an uncertain future. The iPhone-politics of self-congratulating status updates has begun to unravel, revealing a dark underbelly that we thought was merely dead weight. We thought this election would cast it aside, like stones in a backpack. But the weight is inside of us, deeper than any limb, side-by-side with our heart.
By 2016, games are clearly here to stay. Yearly statistics on gaming have invoked consistent comparisons of games to the film industry in terms of consumption, popularity, and social effects, which imply that games will be the main influential artistic phenomenon of the twenty-first century, in the way that films were of the twentieth. Games are clearly a very rich field of research, but researching them is difficult for two main reasons: (1) the dismissal of video games as unique and significant cultural texts, as they are seen as infantile or apolitical (or badly political), and (2) the limitations of game studies discourse itself, which too often refuses to engage with meaningful political questions concerning empire, race and sexuality, beyond appeals for better representation (with some notable exceptions, particularly the books Games of Empire and Gaming at the Edge). While my published essay deals mainly with the first problem (the dismissal of video games), here I want to touch on the second problem (the limits of game studies) by sharing my experience at multiple conference sites where portions of this paper were presented.
The 2016 Popular Culture Association / American Cultural Association (PCA/ACA) Conference in Seattle, Washington, had twenty panels on game studies, all within one room. And for the majority of the conference, this “gamer room” appeared to be the most white and male dominated space at the conference. Speakers did acknowledge that this lack of diversity was a problem, yet the humorous tone of the panels—with inside jokes and casual presentations on “virtual sauntering” and bearded dragons playing ant smashing games—suggested that the boys-club phenomenon was in full effect, with most participants enjoying the “in the know” banter without fear of someone feeling excluded or of themselves being called out to task. The lack of being fundamentally challenged by others has left much of the field over-committed to questions that lack substantial outcomes, or that seriously investigate the relationship between games and power.
A second conference confirmed my initial feelings, The International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) conference held in Hong Kong in May 2016. Like the PCA/ACA Conference, ISEA had a room dedicated to game studies, which again, was almost entirely male and majority (white/Chinese) dominated. Despite being in Hong Kong, not one game scholar mentioned the manufacturing process of these games, particularly the heinous association of game manufacturing with the exploitation of young women in the Pearl River Delta, made visible through the 2012 suicides at Foxconn. I raised this issue during the Q&A of a panel that contained the word “labor” in its title. I received only blank stares, with one panelist agreeing that sexism in gaming was definitely a problem. To add a callousness to this indifference, the most talked about moment in the gaming room was not the exclusion of the exploitation of game production, but a long spat between a renowned game scholar and members of the crowd who disagreed with his close reading of Ian Bogosts’ Persuasive Games (over whether or not Bogosts’ view of “procedural rhetoric” takes semiotics fully into account).
While conferences on popular culture have felt confined to the discourse of the traditional game studies crowd, conferences that I’ve attended in American Studies and Ethnic Studies have had a lack of game scholarship, practically ignoring the impact of this cultural phenomenon. My published essay attempts to fill this gap by asking questions that pertain more to American Studies: How does gameplay that requires players to virtually kill Asians reproduce and secure the player’s identity and social world? How can violent gameplay shock the player, unsettle them, or cause them to reassess their given notions of third world space? My experience presenting this paper has been the same at every conference, whether it is in a “gaming room” or in a room with no game scholars at all. It is well received with applause, but with very little engagement.
One of the main reasons I came into game studies (besides being an avid gamer) was the anger I felt reading game scholarship that either ignored marginalization and oppression, or sought easy cures by appealing to game designers to do a better job representing “us.” But despite my anger, nearly every game studies scholar I have ever interacted with has welcomed my critiques, and has encouraged raising more fundamental issues concerning the larger political and cultural stakes of the field. Indeed, these critical perspectives on gaming have gained traction in popular game magazines, podcasts and ezines, particularly from the work of Austin Walker (a previous editor for Giant Bomb who is now working for Vice), Gita Jackson (Match 3 podcast), and Soha Kareem (Dames Making Games), as well as many, many others.
I doubt many game scholars will disagree with me that the main problem behind the obstacles of game studies is, and has been from the beginning, privilege: the privilege to be the male child who is given the game controller while their sister merely watches them play, the privilege of having the access as well as the confidence to use new technology, and the privilege to make it to academia with the presumption that you should study something “universal” (like new media) rather than studying yourselves (gender, race and queer studies). Of course, we end up studying ourselves regardless of the field, some of us more consciously than others.
The last conference I’ll briefly discuss has not yet happened. It is the 2016 American Studies Association conference, set to occur in Denver, Colorado, at the end of November. Out of hundreds of presentations, only one will be focused on video games. Mine. I hope in the forthcoming years that this number grows, and that my essay helps develop a critical platform to confront our current moment.